REMM-Studio: an Integrated Model-Driven Environment for Requirements Specification, Validation and Formatting

In order to integrate requirements into the current Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, the traditional document-based requirements specification process should be changed into a requirements modelling process. To achieve this we propose a requirements metamodel called REMM Requirements Engineering MetaModel) which includes the elements that should appear in a requirements model (requirements, stakeholders, test cases, etc.) together with the relationships that may appear between them. This metamodel is the basis of the REMM-Studio environment which enables: (1) to build graphical requirements models, (2) to validate them against the metamodel and against a set of additional OCL constraints, and (3) to automatically generate a navigable Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document as the main deliverable of the Requirements Engineering process. REMM-Studio is expected to ease the integration of requirements with other development models (e.g. component models) and to facilitate the validation of the SRS thanks to its navigability.MEDWSA (TIN2006-15175-C05-02), DEDALO (TIN2006-15175-C05-03), DESERT (PBC-05-012-3)Escuela Técnica superior de Ingeniería Agronómic

Gestión del control de acceso en historiales clínicos electrónicos: revisión sistemática de la literatura

ResumenObjetivoEste trabajo presenta los resultados de una revisión sistemática de la literatura relacionada con aspectos del control de acceso en sistemas de historias clínicas electrónicas, la seguridad en entornos inalámbricos y la formación de los usuarios de dichos sistemas en temas de privacidad y seguridad.MétodosComo fuente de información se utilizaron artíıculos originales encontrados en las bases de datos Medline, ACM Digital Library, Wiley InterScience, IEEE Digital Library, Science@Direct, MetaPress, ERIC, CINAHL y Trip Database, publicados entre enero de 2006 y enero de 2011. Se extrajeron 1208 artículos usando una cadena de búsqueda predefinida, y el resultado fue revisado por los autores. El resultado final de la selección fue de 24 artículos.Resultados21 de los artículos encontrados mencionaban las políticas de acceso a los sistemas de historias clínicas electrónicas. Once artículos discuten si deben ser las personas o las entidades quienes concedan los permisos en las historias clínicas electrónicas. Los entornos inalámbricos sólo se consideran en tres artículos. Finalmente, sólo cuatro citan expresamente que es necesaria la formación técnica de los usuarios.ConclusionesEl control de acceso basado en roles es el mecanismo preferido para implementar la política de acceso por los diseñadores de historias clínicas electrónicas. El control de acceso es gestionado por usuarios y profesionales médicos en la mayoría de los sistemas, lo que promulga el derecho del paciente a controlar su información. Por último, la seguridad en entornos inalámbricos no es considerada en muchos casos, y sin embargo, una línea de investigación es la eSalud en entornos móviles, conocida como mHealth.AbstractObjectiveThis study presents the results of a systematic literature review of aspects related to access control in electronic health records systems, wireless security and privacy and security training for users.MethodsInformation sources consisted of original articles found in Medline, ACM Digital Library, Wiley InterScience, IEEE Digital Library, Science@Direct, MetaPress, ERIC, CINAHL and Trip Database, published between January 2006 and January 2011. A total of 1,208 articles were extracted using a predefined search string and were reviewed by the authors. The final selection consisted of 24 articles.ResultsOf the selected articles, 21 dealt with access policies in electronic health records systems. Eleven articles discussed whether access to electronic health records should be granted by patients or by health organizations. Wireless environments were only considered in three articles. Finally, only four articles explicitly mentioned that technical training of staff and/or patients is required.ConclusionRole-based access control is the preferred mechanism to deploy access policy by the designers of electronic health records. In most systems, access control is managed by users and health professionals, which promotes patients’ right to control personal information. Finally, the security of wireless environments is not usually considered. However, one line of research is eHealth in mobile environments, called mHealth

The London Charter and the Seville Principles as sources of requirements for e-archaeology systems development purposes

[EN] Requirements engineering (RE) is a discipline of critical importance in software development. This paper provides a process and a set of software artefacts to help in the production of e-archaeology systems with emphasis on requirements reuse and standards. In particular, two important guidelines in the field of earchaeology, the London Charter and the Principles of Seville, have been shown as two sources of requirements to be considered as a starting point for developing this type of systems.[ES] La Ingeniería de Requisitos (IR) es una disciplina de importancia crítica en el desarrollo de software. Este artículo proporciona un proceso y un conjunto de artefactos software para ayudar en la producción de sistemas de e-arqueología con énfasis en reutilización de requisitos y estándares. En particular, dos guías relevantes en el campo de la e-arqueología, la Carta de Londres y los Principios de Sevilla, se han mostrado como dos fuentes de requisitos a tener en cuenta como punto de partida para el desarrollo de este tipo de sistemas.This research is part of the project PEGASO-PANGEA (TIN2009-13718-C02-02), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain).Carrillo Gea, JM.; Toval, A.; Fernández Alemán, JL.; Nicolás, J.; Flores, M. (2013). The London Charter and the Seville Principles as sources of requirements for e-archaeology systems development purposes. Virtual Archaeology Review. 4(9):205-211. https://doi.org/10.4995/var.2013.4275OJS20521149CH'NG, E. et al. (2011): "From sites to landscapes: how computing technology is shaping archaeological practice", en Computer, vol. 44, n. 7, pp. 40-46.COS, J.A. et al. (2012): "Internationalization requirements for e-learning audit purposes", en Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2012, pp. 90-95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/educon.2012.6201027GLASS, R.L. (2002): Software engineering: facts and fallacies. Addison-Wesley. Boston.GREENFIELD, J. and SHORT, K. (2004): Software factories: assembling applications with patterns, models, frameworks, and tools. Wiley. Indianapolis.KÄKÖLÄ, T. and DUEÑAS, J.C. (Eds.) (2006): Software Product Lines. Research issues in engineering and management. Springer. Berlin Heidelberg. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-33253-4TOVAL, A. et al. (2002): "Requirements reuse for improving information systems security: a practitioner's approach", en REJ Requirements Engineering Journal, vol. 6, n. 4, pp. 205-219.TOVAL, A. et al. (2008): "Eight key issues for an effective reuse-based requirements process", en IJCSSE International Journal of Computer Systems Science and Engineering, vol. 23, n. 6, pp. 373-385.TOVAL, A. et al. (2011): "Learning systems development using reusable standard-based requirements catalogs", en Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON 2011, pp. 907- 912. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/educon.2011.577325

A collaborative learning experience in modeling the requirements of teleoperated system for ship hull maintenance

This paper presents a join experience in modelling the requirements of the product line of teleoperated systems for ship hull maintenance, which are basically robotic systems used for ship maintenance operations, such as cleaning or painting the ship hull. It is proposed to specify the product line requirements through a feature model, a conceptual model, and a use case model, which together allow domain understanding, derivation of reusable product line requirements, and efficient decision-making in the specification of new systems developed in the product line. Action Research, a qualitative research method in software engineering, has been applied to define the collaborative research process

Cooperative learning of requirements engineering through an international educational scenario enabled by the MOY programme

The International Excellence Campus for Higher Education and Research of the Region of Murcia, and the Mediterranean Office for Youth (MOY) programme are new initiatives that offer opportunities for designing educational activities in which can take part international students enrolled in academic degrees at different universities. Besides, a significant rise in distributed and collaborative software development has been observed in recent years (Global Software Development, GSD), which involves space, time and socio-cultural distances and requires new techniques, tools and practices to meet new challenges and opportunities. In addition, poor requirements are one of the most common causes of project failure in any domain. Projects which devote more resources to Requirements Engineering (RE) result in lower costs and lower deviations of their planning. Therefore, the relevance of education and training the future systems and software professionals in RE activities and techniques, in particular in GSD environments, must be stressed. We have conducted an educational innovation activity based on teaching RE in co-located and GSD contexts. This activity has been carried out in the form of an experiment with students. This paper presents the scenario in which this educational activity is framed as well as some preliminary results of this experiment

Aplicación de juegos serios en la enseñanza de Ingeniería de Requisitos y Gestión de Proyectos

La lección magistral es una metodología docente que permite especificar y aclarar los principales conceptos ligados a cualquier campo del conocimiento. Sin embargo, para ciertas materias, como es el caso de Ingeniería de Requisitos y Gestión de Proyectos, esta metodología puede resultar tediosa y aburrida, lo que deriva en pérdida de interés por parte de los estudiantes y, en consecuencia, aumento en el índice de absentismo. La inasistencia a clase está asociada al fracaso académico y al abandono o prolongación de los estudios. Varios autores han demostrado la eficacia de los juegos serios en la docencia universitaria: aumento de la motivación, mayor concentración y consecución de los objetivos de aprendizaje marcados. Actualmente es posible encontrar numerosas actividades de esta índole para materias como Ingeniería de Requisitos y Gestión de Proyectos. En este trabajo se describe la aplicación de algunos de estos juegos serios en una asignatura del Grado en Ingeniería Informática que abarca dichas materias. Como resultado, los estudiantes encuentran las actividades desarrolladas más interesantes, se limita el absentismo y mejoran las tasas de éxito.Educational methodologies based on master class allow to explain in detail and spread concepts related to any field of knowledge. However, for certain topics of technical areas, such as the Requirements Engineering and Project Management, these methodologies may turn boring and cumbersome, which leads to students losing interest and, consequently, increasing the absenteeism. The lack of attendance to lectures is associated with academic failure and abandonment, or with more time required to complete the studies. Several authors have demonstrated the effectiveness of serious games in university teaching with students more motivated, greater concentration and achievement of the established learning outcomes. Nowadays, a lot of activities of this nature are available for knowledge areas such as Requirements Engineering and Project Management. This paper describes the use of some of these serious games in a subject, part of the BSc on Computer Science, which covers these disciplines. As a result, students found the activities carried out during the lectures more interesting, absenteeism was reduced, and success rates were improved.Trabajo realizado en el ámbito del proyecto “Aplicación de juegos serios en la enseñanza de informática: proyecto piloto en gestión de proyectos” de la convocatoria para promover proyectos y acciones de innovación y mejora en la Universidad de Murcia para el curso 2018/2019. Está investigación forma parte del proyecto GINSENG-UMU (TIN2015-70259-C2-2-R) y está financiada por el Ministerio Español de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades y el Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER)

The Effect of Green Software: A Study of Impact Factors on the Correctness of Software

Unfortunately, sustainability is an issue very poorly used when developing software and hardware systems. Lately, and in order to contribute to the earth sustainability, a new concept emerged named Green software which is computer software that can be developed and used efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact to the environment. Currently, new teaching methods based on students’ learning process are being developed in the European Higher Education Area. Most of them are oriented to promote students’ interest in the course’s contents and offer personalized feedback. Online judging is a promising method for encouraging students’ participation in the e-learning process, although it still has to be researched and developed to be widely used and in a more efficient way. The great amount of data available in an online judging tool provides the possibility of exploring some of the most indicative attributes (e.g., running time, memory) for learning programming concepts, techniques and languages. So far, the most applied methods for automatically gathering information from the judging systems are based on statistical methods and, although providing reasonable correlations, these methods have not been proven to provide enough information for predicting grades when dealing with a huge amount of data. Therefore, the great novelty of this paper is to develop a data mining approach to predict program correctness as well as the grades of the students’ practices. For this purpose, powerful data mining technologies taken from the artificial intelligence domain have been used. In particular, in this study, we have used logistic regression, decision trees, artificial neural network and support vector machines; which have been properly identified as the most suitable ones for predicting activities in the e-learning domains. The results have achieved an accuracy of around 74%, both in the prediction of the program correctness as well as in the practice grades’ prediction. Another relevant issue provided in this paper is a comparison among these four techniques to obtain the best accuracy in predicting grades based on the availability of data as well as their taxonomy. The Decision Trees classifier has obtained the best confusion matrix, and time and memory efficiency were identified as the most important predictor variables. In view of these results, we can conclude that the development of green software leads programmers to implement correct software.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER) under the granted project SEQUOIA-UA (TIN2015-63502-C3-3-R), project GINSENG-UMU (TIN2015-70259-C2-2-R) supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and European FEDER funds. This work has also been partially funded by University of Alicante, under project GRE14-10 and by the Generalitat Valenciana, Spain, under project GV/2016/087

Data mining for exploring E-learning in a computer science course using online judging

[SPA] En el Espacio Europeo de Enseñanza Superior emergen nuevas metodologías de enseñanza basadas en el proceso de aprendizaje de los estudiantes, que promueven el interés de los estudiantes y ofrecen retroalimentación personalizada. Los sistemas de enjuiciamiento en red son métodos prometedores para estimular la participación de los estudiantes en el proceso de aprendizaje. La enorme cantidad de datos disponible en un sistema de enjuiciamiento en red ofrece la posibilidad de explorar qué parámetros son relevantes para el aprendizaje de la programación de computadores. En este artículo, se identifican los factores que afectan a la corrección de los programas a partir de las actividades de programación en un curso de algoritmos y estructuras de datos. Se utilizan tecnologías de minería de datos como los árboles de decisión, que han demostrado ser muy efectivos como predictores en algunos dominios de aprendizaje electrónico. Los resultados muestran que los parámetros Lenguaje de programación, Número de problema y Titulación pueden ser utilizados como predictores de la corrección de un programa, con una precisión del 60,1%. Como trabajo futuro, pretendemos estudiar los factores que afectan al rendimiento de los trabajadores en un entorno de desarrollo global del software, aplicando la minería de datos a actividades de programación colaborativas. [ENG] New teaching methods based on the students' learning process are being developed in the European Higher Education Area. Most of them are oriented to promote students' interest in the study and offer personalized feedback. On-line judging is a promising method for encouraging students’ participation in the elearning process. The great amount of data available in an on-line judging tool provides the possibility of exploring some of the most indicative attributes for learning programming concepts and techniques. In this paper, the results of programming activities carried out in a course on “Algorithms and Data Structures” has been used to identify the factors that affect the program correction, by using powerful data mining technologies taken from artificial intelligence domain. Concretely, our study uses a decision tree because it has been identified as the best predictor in some elearning domains. An overall accuracy of 60.1% in the prediction of the program correction was achieved with three input parameters (Programming language, Number of problem and Degree). In future work, we aim to analyze collaborative activities in order to identify the factors or predictor variables that affect workers’ performance in a global software development contextThis research is part of the PEGASO-PANGEA projects (TIN2009-13718-C02-02) financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain), and the GEODAS project (TIN2012-37493-C03) financed by both the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European FEDER funds. This work was also supported by the Spanish MINECO, as well as European Commission FEDER funds, under grant TIN2012-38341-C04-03

5Ws of Green and Sustainable Software

: Green and Sustainable Software has emerged as a new and highly active area in the software community. After several years of research and work, we believe that it is now necessary to obtain a general snapshot of how the research in this area is evolving. To do so, we have applied the 5Ws (why, when, who, where, and what), a formula for getting the complete story on a subject. We have therefore carried out a study, using 542 publications related to Green and Sustainable Software research; these were recovered using SCOPUS. The results obtained allow us to conclude that it is important to identify key elements of the research to allow researchers be fully aware of the state of the research on Green and Sustainable Software (why); the study uses papers published between 2000 and the beginning of November 2018 (when); the most prolific authors are mainly from Europe, although the USA is the most active country, Green and Sustainable Software being a very interactive area with a good number of multinational publications (who); the top five keywords related to sustainable aspects are Green Software, Green IT, Software Sustainability, Energy Consumption, and Energy Efficiency (what); finally, as regards the places authors prefer to publish in, there is almost a complete balance between conferences and journals, with a trend towards an increase in the number of publications (where)

Energy efficiency in software: A case study on sustainability in personal health records

A personal health record is an eHealth technology in which users can observe their progress over time for a given condition. A research gap was identified in the literature concerning the study of the amount of energy that these systems need for their operation, and the energy efficiency that may be attained depending on their design. After the selection of five representative personal health records, a total of 20 tasks commonly done, and based on previous work, were performed with regard to two proposed scenarios, namely patient use and health personnel usage. The power consumption of the main components of a host machine was measured during the performance of the proposed duties. To that end, a hardware tool called the Energy Efficiency Tester was employed. The data collected were analyzed statistically, and significant differences were found in the respective consumption of the display (χ2 (4) = 23.782, p = 0.000), the processor (χ2 (4) = 29.018, p = 0.000) and the whole PC (χ2 (4) = 28.582, p = 0.000). For all of these components, NoMoreClipBoard was the personal health record that required the least energy (57.699 W for the display, 3.162 W for the processor and 181.113 W for the whole PC). A total of two strong correlations were found in the energy consumption between the hard disk and the graphics card (r = 0.791, p < 0.001), and the processor and the PC (r = 0.950, p < 0.001). Some features generated special amounts of power consumption, such as the news wall found on PatientsLikeMe, or the use of load icons that had an impact on most PC components. In addition, an in-depth analysis of the user interfaces was performed. A discussion was carried out on the design of the user interfaces, also taking into account recommendations drawn from the literature, checking for their implementation in the personal health records selected. With the aim of promoting sustainability among software developers, a best practice guideline on sustainable software design was proposed. Basic sustainability recommendations were collected for professionals to consider when developing a software system in general, and a personal health record in particular.Un registro de salud personal es una tecnología de salud electrónica en la que los usuarios pueden observar su progreso a lo largo del tiempo para una condición determinada. Se identificó un vacío de investigación en la literatura referente al estudio de la cantidad de energía que estos sistemas necesitan para su funcionamiento, y la eficiencia energética que se puede alcanzar dependiendo de su diseño. Después de la selección de cinco registros de salud personales representativos, se realizaron un total de 20 tareas comúnmente realizadas, y con base en trabajos previos, con respecto a dos escenarios propuestos, a saber, el uso del paciente y el uso del personal de salud. Se midió el consumo de energía de los principales componentes de una máquina host durante el desempeño de las tareas propuestas. Para ello, se empleó una herramienta de hardware denominada Energy Efficiency Tester. Los datos recopilados fueron analizados estadísticamente,2 (4) = 23.782, p = 0.000), el procesador (χ 2 (4) = 29.018, p = 0.000) y toda la PC (χ 2(4) = 28.582, p = 0.000). Para todos estos componentes, NoMoreClipBoard fue el registro de salud personal que requirió la menor cantidad de energía (57.699 W para la pantalla, 3.162 W para el procesador y 181.113 W para toda la PC). Se encontraron un total de dos fuertes correlaciones en el consumo de energía entre el disco duro y la tarjeta gráfica (r = 0.791, p < 0.001), y el procesador y la PC (r = 0.950, p < 0.001). Algunas características generaron cantidades especiales de consumo de energía, como el muro de noticias que se encuentra enpatientslikeme, o el uso de íconos de carga que tuvieron un impacto en la mayoría de los componentes de la PC. Además, se realizó un análisis en profundidad de las interfaces de usuario. Se realizó una discusión sobre el diseño de las interfaces de usuario, teniendo en cuenta también las recomendaciones extraídas de la literatura, comprobando su implantación en las historias clínicas personales seleccionadas. Con el objetivo de promover la sostenibilidad entre los desarrolladores de software, se propuso una guía de mejores prácticas sobre diseño de software sostenible. Se recopilaron recomendaciones básicas de sustentabilidad para que los profesionales las consideren al desarrollar un sistema de software en general y un registro de salud personal en particular